Just as the world is watching Lebanon, trying to understand the conflict there, so are experts in modern warfare theory, who see in the battle between Israel and Hezbollah a living -- and dying -- test of their ideas.

And in many important ways, they say, Hezbollah appears to understand this war better than its opponent, one of the world's most highly trained and best-equipped militaries.

"I think it's something new, in that a non-state organization has undertaken a major, sustained, broad-scale, and so far, the successful military offensive against a state," said William Lind, director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "What changes here ... is that non-state forces are able to challenge states militarily -- and win."

Some experts call it "modern warfare," some call it "unconventional conflict," others use technical terms such as "netwar" or "fourth-generation warfare."

The definitions differ, but all refer generally to conflict in which small, decentralized, non-state groups can turn the advantages of large national armies -- overwhelming firepower, high technology, a clear hierarchy of command -- into disadvantages, and in which winning political and public relations victories matters more than counting casualties and bombing sorties.

Elements of that kind of war have been part of conflict since antiquity, but most experts say they moved to the fore in the Iraq war -- and even more so in the current Lebanon conflict.

"It's both a conventional and an unconventional conflict. It has aspects of both," said Army Special Forces Lt. Col. James Gavrilis, an expert in counterinsurgency tactics. "It includes both state actors and non-state actors -- it pretty much has everything."

"Winning" and "losing" can mean far different things than the familiar imagery of swords surrendered and treaties signed. In modern warfare theory, the difference between strategic and tactical victories is crucial.

"Military tactics are the art and science of winning battles," said Thomas Hammes, a retired Marine colonel and author of "The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century."

"Military strategy is the art and science of winning wars," he said.

In Vietnam, for example, U.S. troops can claim they never suffered a tactical defeat. Yet the North Vietnamese can rightly claim a strategic victory, because they achieved their political goals of unifying the entire country under their control, said Kalev Sepp, a counterinsurgency specialist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

In Lebanon, several theorists said, Israel and Hezbollah seem to be shaping their efforts toward different goals -- in a sense, fighting different wars.

"The Israelis are currently winning militarily, tactically. But the strategic dimension is more significant," Gavrilis said.

It is in that strategic dimension -- the long-term political and public relations goals of each side -- that Hezbollah seems to have an advantage, perhaps, Sepp said, because Israel has allowed its immediate tactical goal of stopping rocket attacks to overwhelm its strategic sense.

"War is inherently political, and the political goal needs to stay foremost," Sepp said. "If it becomes focused on military operations, then what is best and easiest for the military to do begins to drive operations, instead of what is important politically."

Hezbollah, on the other hand, appears to be far more focused on increasing its political power in Lebanon and its prestige in the Arab world, and perhaps of diverting attention from the political woes of its patrons, Syria and Iran, the analysts said. For Hezbollah, causing casualties is not the main goal.

"The rockets are the matador's cape," Lind said. "Their purpose was to get the bull to charge, and in that they were successful."

The consequences of that charge -- Israel's tactical bombing of targets in Lebanon, which have killed far more Lebanese civilians than Hezbollah fighters -- became strategic weapons for Hezbollah through its own television network and the combined media power of a globalized world. Such power to instantaneously mold world opinion and seek to use it to pressure your enemy is one of the truly new things about this conflict, the theorists said.

"Civilians have died in the battlefield before ... but the way that it's publicized changes the outcomes of conflict," Gavrilis said. "That is new."

The message coming through that global network speaks directly to the Arab public, the source of Hezbollah's political strength -- that it can take on the mightier Israeli army and keep the fight going, the analysts said.

"Political will is a central component of any combat. Pictures influence political will," Hammes said. It is a lesson, he said, the United States learned in the Vietnam War and Israel in the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, with its photos of boys throwing rocks taking fire from well-armed soldiers. "I really question why Israel didn't understand that in the first stages of the (Lebanon) war."

Its upper hand in the battle of perceptions also allows Hezbollah to make the most of its fairly limited military arsenal, composed mostly of Iranian-made rockets with limited range and no guidance systems.

In conventional war, that arsenal would be overpowered by Israel's cutting-edge artillery, special operations ground forces and air force. But in this conflict, Hezbollah has made a powerful weapon of its ability just to fire rockets into Israel -- a strategic, psychological weapon that serves as a counter to Israel's tactical victories.

"Israel keeps coming out and saying, 'We've eradicated their command and control structure, and this percent of their arsenal has been eradicated,' and in the next few minutes you see a barrage of rockets," said Reva Bhalla, assistant director of geopolitical analysis at Stratfor, a private intelligence consultancy in Austin, Texas.

That emphasis on perception and psychology, Lind said, is a defining characteristic of what he calls fourth-generation warfare, pitting non-state actors against traditional nation-states. That kind of warfare simultaneously addresses three levels of conflict: physical, moral and mental.

"The fourth-generation forces play the whole spectrum, and they realize that the moral level is the most powerful and the physical level is the least powerful," Lind said.

Looking forward, it's not clear that Hezbollah will retain a strategic advantage, the experts said -- indeed, several said they do not anticipate an "end," but more of a "steady state" in which both sides declare victory and go home to fight another day.

Israel could seek to regain the strategic advantage, some analysts said, perhaps by continuing its military campaign past its tactical goal, the point where rockets stop, and on toward a point where Hezbollah no longer can be perceived as a credible resistance group, a move that for Hezbollah could mean political -- strategic -- defeat.

"Potentially, you could have a reversal where the strategic victory could go back over to the Israelis," Gavrilis said. "Even if there is this great moral victory (for Hezbollah) and Hezbollah now becomes disarmed by the Lebanese government, that is much more of a strategic victory (for Israel) than the moral victory, which can be fleeting."

"I think Israel is already laying the groundwork for that ... as is Hezbollah," Hammes agreed. "The problem is, I'm not sure Israel can back them up far enough to stop the rockets. At the end of this thing, even if they're only firing three or four rockets a week, it's still a victory for Hezbollah."

On the other hand, Hezbollah might achieve its strategic victory -- political power and popular support -- and choose to go on in search of a tactical victory, an option most analysts said was unlikely but that Lind said was uncomfortably plausible, requiring only that Israel be forced to pull out under a rain of Hezbollah rockets.

"I think that there is, perhaps for the first time, a very real possibility that the fourth-generation non-state force will win at the tactical and physical levels," he said.

The mere possibility of such an unprecedented outcome, Lind said, could encourage other states to look at the Lebanon-Hezbollah conflict as a strategic model that might bear duplication.

"You are going to see states both try to link up as closely as they can with non-state forces ... and also states trying, particularly weak states facing strong states, trying to adapt some of the techniques of the fourth-generation groups for themselves," he said. "This is part of a generational shift."

That may already be happening in Lebanon, Hammes said, where the immediate conflict of Hezbollah against Israel is only the top layer -- below it, Syria is battling Israel through one layer of proxies, and below that Iran is battling the United States through two layers of proxies.

"That's one of the problems with modern conflict," Hammes said. "It's much more interrelated in different ways."

Those relationships -- and the increasing availability of powerful weapons, such as Hezbollah's rockets, to non-state actors -- demand a change in the way the United States and other nations think about conflict, the theorists agreed.

Even the conventional definition of war -- a legal state declared between two nation-states -- may need an overhaul. At the least it needs a widening, said Lind.

"State militaries more or less define war as what they train, prepare and equip themselves to do," Lind said. In the American military, and many modern state militaries, that means war is limited to the Cold War model, with clear rules and controlled outcomes.

The lesson of Lebanon is that the field is now crowded with new players and new rules, the theorists said.

"State militaries in effect say, 'We're the knights on horseback, we fight other knights on horseback. We don't get down and trade potshots with lowly musketeers,' " Lind said. "What it symbolizes is a previous military type ... passing into history. Because, in effect, they only become useful for tournaments."

At a glance

Diplomacy: United States and France agree on a draft U.N. resolution for a cease-fire monitored by international troops. It still must gain acceptance by Israel, Lebanon and Hezbollah.

Casualties: At least 8 Lebanese civilians die and two Israeli soldiers. A Hezbollah barrage of 140 rockets during a 90-minute period kills three women in northern Israel.

Theories of war

The various theories of modern warfare -- such as fourth-generation warfare, "netwar" and counterinsurgency operations -- share some elements with ancient forms of warfare, as well as with techniques that are not usually associated with war, including counter-narcotics operations and cyber-terrorism. While the theories differ in significant respects, there are elements common to most of them:

A use of all available networks -- political, economic, social and military -- to convince enemy political leaders that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly to achieve.

A lack of clearly defined conditions, including beginning and end, victory or defeat, peace or war, civilian and combatant. Modern wars of this type tend to last for years as conflict surges and ebbs and moves between political, military and other battlegrounds.

Antagonists are organized more as sprawling, "leaderless" networks than as tight-knit hierarchies.

At least one side is something other than a military force organized and operating under the control of a national government -- a force that appears widely dispersed and largely undefined, lacking bases, centers of power and other traditional points of assault. These groups tend to seek to use their opponents' size, power and legitimacy against them.

An emphasis on high technology that allows small organizations to asymmetrically attack larger ones -- for example, availability of weapons of mass destruction, tools of electronic warfare or easy access to global media for purposes of propaganda. Thomas Hammes has suggested this may have happened with the anthrax attacks that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which he has suggested may have been the advent of "fifth-generation warfare."

Under William Lind's theory of changing warfare over time, first-generation warfare, based around the smooth-bore musket and minimally trained conscript forces, focused on massed manpower and direct fire. Second-generation warfare, based on rifled muskets, machine guns and light artillery, along with advances in communications, replaced massed manpower with massed indirect firepower. Third-generation warfare introduced nonlinear tactics, bypassing and infiltrating enemy forces to collapse them from within, with an emphasis on speedy maneuver. From this came fourth-generation warfare -- asymmetric warfare and the use of small, agile tactical forces used against traditional massed armies.

Sources: "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation" (William S. Lind, et al.); "The Sling and the Stone, On War in the 21st Century" (Thomas X. Hammes); "The Advent of Netwar" (John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt, RAND); Chronicle research